The late night host struck the right tone during his first episode back. But Trump still wants to silence dissent.
Jimmy Kimmel was back on the air Tuesday night after being suspended last week by ABC’s parent company, the Walt Disney Company, following pressure from President Donald Trump and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr. Kimmel addressed the controversy surrounding his comments a week earlier, denounced political violence, stressed how important it was to stand up for free speech in the U.S., and then went right back to mocking Trump, who tweeted about Kimmel shortly before the episode had even aired.
Kimmel’s monologue Tuesday, which is available on YouTube, struck the right tone in an environment where it was unclear if the late night host would need to show subservience to Trump in order to get his job back. It seems like just about every other high-profile figure with something to lose has bowed down to Trump when it mattered.
Big tech executives recently went around the table praising the vapid authoritarian; Columbia University paid $200 million to make bogus charges of anti-semitism go away; and CBS’s parent company shelled out $16 million in what may as well have been a quid pro quo to get Paramount’s merger with SkyDance approved. It’s all been so undignified.
But Kimmel never kissed Trump’s ass on Tuesday night and didn’t formally apologize for what he said last week, instead explaining that he understood how people could have taken what he said the wrong way. Kimmel was earnest and heartfelt without appeasing the fascists that seem to have infiltrated every corner of Washington D.C. during Trump’s second term.What was the scandal again?
The supposed “scandal” that started it all was perplexing. It was ostensibly about MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk, who was murdered on Sept. 10 while debating college kids in Utah.
During his show on Monday, Sept. 15, Kimmel said, “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
It was the lead-in to a joke about Trump, and you can watch the entire one-minute segment below. But that short line was the entirety of the controversy. And most conservative news outlets talking about Kimmel’s comments didn’t even bother to play the clip for viewers.
We can do this the easy way or the hard way
The comments didn’t really get any widespread notice until FCC chairman Carr appeared on the streaming show of MAGA influencer Benny Johnson two days later. And Kimmel addressed Carr’s mob-like tactics during his own show on Tuesday.
“Brendan Carr, the chairman of the FCC, telling an American company ‘we can do this the easy way or the hard way’ —and that these companies can find ways to change conduct or take action on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead—in addition to being a direct violation of the First Amendment, is not a particularly intelligent threat to make in public,” Kimmel said.
“Ted Cruz said he sounded like a mafioso,” Kimmel continued. “Although I don’t know, if you want to hear a mob boss make a threat like that, you have to hide a microphone in a deli and park outside in a van with a tape recorder all night long. This genius said it on a podcast.”
Kimmel reluctantly gave Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, some credit for saying that the U.S. government shouldn’t dictate what people are allowed to hear. He also discussed the other late-night hosts, as well as the support he received from people around the world.
